Among the potential changes: mandatory annual worker training on pesticide safety and their
rights to protect themselves. Now, this training must be done once every five years. Other changes:
mandatory "no-entry" signs for fields that have been newly treated with pesticides; and a
first-ever minimum age requirement of 16 for handling pesticides, with an exemption for family
farms.

A
2008 study of
Agricultural Health Study data showed farmers
with the highest number of lifetime exposure days to agricultural pesticides were 50 percent more
likely to be diagnosed with clinical depression than those with the fewest application days. If the
farmers had applied a class of insecticide called "
organophosphates," they
were 80 percent more likely to become clinically depressed.